How to Tuneup Your Netbook - tune and speed up your HP Mini or Aspire One

Storage Space

Netbooks can have very small hard drives. On my first netbook, I opted to get a solid state hard drive. At the time they offered an 8 gig and 16 gig size options. I chose the 16 gig one. When I got the laptop I checked the storage space and 8 gigs had already been used up by the operating system. That left me with another 8 gigs of memory, which quickly disappeared the first day as I installed my favorite must have programs.

Need More Disk Space?

Thankfully, USB Flash Drives
and Memory Cards have grown in size and are dirt cheap. I was very
happy when I found out that I could get a 32 gig Flash Drives or SD
cards for under $100. I picked up one of each and my netbooks storage
capacity grew 5 times larger.

Memory Cards

Buy a USB Flash Drive

Increase Speed of Files Stored on Removable Drives

The
next problem that I encountered was that my netbook was running very
slow. I noticed that files I launched from my sd card or usb drive were
the problematic ones.

In
order to prevent possible data corruption or loss when you hot swap,
(remove while it is still on) a removable storage device, like a USB
Flash Drive or Memory Card, by default windows will cache the data
while it writes it. That way if you unplug the removable storage device
before it is done writing any changes, it does not corrupt your files.
Because of the added overhead, this feature is that it causes theses
drives to function slower.

If you are planning on regularly
removing the flash drive or memory card you should leave it set to the
default optimization for quick removal. However, if you plan on running
applications from it and leaving it plugged in most of the time, you
should consider setting the Flash Drive or Memory Card for optimized
performance.

Just make sure that you do not pull the Flash Drive or Memory Card out
without removing it safely by unmounting the drive first.

Internal USB Storage Drives

Some
netbooks, like the HP Mini, actually have a recessed USB drive which
you can install a small USB flash drive inside of the laptop without
having the USB stick protruding out of the laptop. As these internal USB flash drives are not ment to be swapped out regularly, there is no
need to optimize them for quick removal and they should be set to
optimize for performance.

Buy a Mini USB Flash Drive

Portable External Hard Drives

You
can also get a Portable External Hard Drives, which will offer much more
space. You can get a small USB External Hard Drive, however, you may
not always want to carry it around with your netbook.

Memory Upgrades

One of the cheapest and easiest hardware upgrades you can do is upgrading your memory.

Most netbooks have a panel on the bottom marked with memory or small icon of a memory stick which can be opened by removing one or two small screws. Once removed the memory can be simply swapped out. Detailed instructions for your particular netbook can be found in your user guide or by searching online for your netbook name and model number followed by "memory upgrade instructions" .

The hardest part to upgrading your memory is selecting the correct memory. Before you buy any memory make sure that it is the correct memory for your computer.

Comments

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n0va59

6 years ago

I have had my hp mini for a few years now and I gotta say I love it as much today as the day I bought it. It works just fine, does everything I need it to do and hp service has been stellar. How do I know this you might ask...lol well due to my own stupidity and nativity I crashed and burned my own harddrive (by downloading way to many movies with no external storage) Anyway netbook was still under warranty, hp fed exed me a box and repair slip with-in 24hrs, I shipped it straight back and my netbook was returned to me in exactly one week with a brand new hd and not a cent out of pocket for me.

I will always only buy hp products now because of that experience. Btw since the new hd was installed (with-in the 1st 2months I had the netbook)I have learned much, lol I now use an external hd for large storage...hehehe well at least I learned that lesson on hp's dime

0,3625

6 years ago

A lot of Publicity -.-!

sunforged

8 years agofrom Sunforged.com

I just picked up a 16gb SDHC for my eeePc900 and Im loving it, was able to bring 18 movies with me on my train trip home for vacation!

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